In time for Dreamville, J. Cole mural underway in downtown Fayetteville. The details.

Hip-hop artist J. Cole is known to give his hometown a shoutout in his music, whether he calls the city “the Ville,” “FayetteNam” or its given name, “Fayetteville.”

I’ve always liked that. You should be proud of where you are from no matter where that may be, warts and all.

Our city attracts its share of negativity and haters, but we don’t have to contribute to the nonsense.

As for those Cole shoutouts? People hear it.

That includes Andaluz the Artist, whose striking public murals of everyone from the late NBA star Kobe Bryant to the late PBS art icon Bob Ross are seen across the nation. He is now working locally on a mural for Cole on the side of a building for Back Around Records and Bails For Tails, near the traffic circle in downtown Fayetteville.

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Andaluz, a Queens, New York, native whose real name is Efren Andaluz III, said that when it comes to Fayetteville, Cole “talks about it so much.

“Even though I’m from New York, when someone is a poet and someone is a storyteller, they bring you into their life. And so he did this with his lyrics, where he would always talk about Fayetteville, which is a small town but a beautiful town. There’s two sides to it.”

Looking for a wall

Andaluz said finding a wall for the Cole mural initially presented a challenge. His wife eventually found the location near the Market House, a big white wall at 1 Market Square; she called the building's owner, Shawn Adkins of Back Around Records (which incidentally has the best vinyl collection in town, and it is not close.)

Andaluz said before that he had reached out to the Arts Council of Fayetteville-Cumberland County and several local businesses.

“And everybody was like, oh the town’s not gonna do this; they’re very old school, and everybody kept shutting me down,” he said. “I’m the type of person, I don’t take no for an answer. ”

He said Adkins of Back Around Records was excited about it.

“We’re gonna get it done,” he said. “We’re going to create history, and that’s what we’re doing over here.”

Next week: Cole’s Dreamville Festival

Andaluz and his team for the project, which includes artists Robert Maynor and Stephon James, began work Monday evening on the mural. Andaluz's plan was to work as much as possible on Tuesday in anticipation of rain on Wednesday and Thursday. He hopes to complete the mural by Friday or Saturday.

The timing could hardly be better: Cole’s Dreamville Festival in Raleigh kicks off next week with a series of events that will culminate next weekend with a show in Dorothea Dix Park. Last year's festival drew more than 100,000 people.

A Fayetteville postcard

The mural, Andaluz said, is meant to be a postcard — with notable Fayetteville symbols embedded in each of the letters that spell out the name of the city. They include images of Iron Mike and the 82nd Airborne patch; the city’s namesake Lafayette; a Bronco representing Fayetteville State University; a picture of Babe Ruth hitting his first professional home run here; a nod to putt-putt miniature golf, invented here; and a woodpecker that finds a home in the Sandhills and not many other places and is also the inspiration for the local baseball team’s name.

We could always quibble here and there over whether this or that symbol should be included or excluded, but I think Andaluz got himself a good sample.

Rakeem Jones, a columnist with The Fayetteville Observer who covers Dreamville and J. Cole, said he and Andaluz had talked about the mural for almost two months.

“A few of those things I actually picked,” said Jones about the city symbols. He said Andaluz had researched and found several of them, but Jones made a few suggestions, including 82nd Airborne, putt-putt and … the numbers “2-6.”

2-6. There is a nickname for the city I have yet to figure out. Some say it refers to some military unit, others say it refers to some kind of code for the city that goes way back.

“But nobody really knows,” Jones said. “It’s just a thing. I was even watching some of the playback from Dreamville last year, and J. Cole definitely yells it on stage.”

And here we are.

Committed Cole fans

Of course, the signature feature of Andaluz’s work will be the image of the Grammy-winning Cole himself — and it will be a magnet for Dreamville fans who wander over here next week to see exactly where their idol is from.

His fans in the past have shown themselves to be committed to celebrating the upbringing of the Terry Sanford High School graduate. Cole gives them ample opportunities. He titled one of his best-selling albums, “2014 Forest Hills Drive,” which he released in 2014, after the street in Fayetteville where he grew up — complete with an image of him sitting on top of the home.

Access to the property has had to be restricted because people were climbing on top of the house to duplicate the pose. I wrote about city workers in 2018 having to move the street signs for Forest Hills Drive high up on the pole because some fans had taken the signs as souvenirs. “They were very brazen about it,” one neighbor told me at the time.

The downtown mural gives Cole World stans a safe and very legal way to pose for pics with their icon — and I am here for it. Remember, the city plans to repurpose the historic Market House, where enslaved people were once sold, into a public square that celebrates Black achievement and the city's diversity. I am just going to go ahead and call the repurposing and mural together a future case of synergy.

Flowers for the living

The Cole postcard represents a new direction for Andaluz The Artist. He wants to give people their flowers while they’re still alive, he said.

“A lot of people paint murals after someone passes,” he said. “And I got tired of doing that. It’s sad. I did so many in my life.”

He wanted to do something more uplifting, he said: “Something like a gift to that person and to the community.”

Opinion Editor Myron B. Pitts can be reached at mpitts@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3559.

This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: Postcard: Behind the scenes of Fayetteville's downtown J. Cole mural